?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
CAGE, JOHN; LONG, LOIS, and SMITH, ALEXANDER. The Mushroom Book. 10 lithographs by Cage or Long on Arches, 560x380 mm; 22x15 inches (sheets), full margins, each signed and marked "A. P. iv/x" by the artists. Folio, text and plates with lettered tissue guards loose as issued in printed wrappers; publisher's denim cloth portfolio. Printed and published by Hollander Workshop, New York. NewYork, 1972
one of only ten artist proofs, roman numbered and signed by cage and long from a total edition of approximately 90. Beautiful botanical lithographs by Long are described on overlay text of Japanese Kitakata paper containing mycological notes by the great scientist Smith play across the page with poems by Cage interleaved with Cage's random word lithographs which were, in his words: "done with handwriting, so that ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, just by looking. Instead of having them come at you clearly, they come to you as hidden things, like Easter eggs . . . the way musrooms do in a forest . . . and so that's what I was trying to suggest in the lithographs, where the words cross over the words"--Cage, with Joan Ratallack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art Music, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2011.
